Kythibong Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 5 Items

Fortified by his collective experiences as a drummer and percussionist on the margins of free rock and improvisation - in Pneu, Papaye, Binidu or La Colonie de Vacances - Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy imagined Tachycardie, a project in which he initiates a paradoxically complex and raw vibratory art where rhythms and drones are born from matter and objects.

For his third disc under his fluttering pseudonym, Geoffroy blurs the lines between compositions/improvisations and field recordings and invites us to prick up our ears in a process of extended listening offering panoramic pieces. These nine practices are so many acousmatic rituals in a semi-natural environment conceived as sound tracking shots which can be listened to as one would apprehend a landscape and its different planes: electro-acoustic panoramas in perspective, at sometimes moderate volume, which invite an increased attention or, on the contrary, a more global listening to atmospheres. It seems that blurring the tracks between what he proposes to hear and the freedom of perception offered to the listener matters to Geoffroy in this compromise between rustic concrete music and rhythmic bas-reliefs played in a crooked way under the shed.

This collection of six pieces brings together nine practices, in formats ranging from a little over two to seven minutes. They function as so many vignettes of "Cinema for the ear" where the little naturalist stories, which we imagine taking place at nightfall, merge with the miniatures of domestic experimental music combining almost fortuitous rhythms and frequencies. The rustling of fauna and flora welcome with open arms the fragile and gently dissonant sounds of Geoffroy. Over the course of the practices, the elements of field recordings seem to integrate the vast palette of the sound director. The pieces thus take on more composed, dense and dynamic turns; we no longer know which of the dog or the synthesizer is barking, whether it's the wind blowing or sticks scratching driftwood, and we marvel at believing everything these concrete, sometimes absurd nursery rhymes tell us.

Three years after Probables, the first discographic manifestation of Tachycardie, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy continues to wander between acousmatic music, minimalism (Tachycardie Ensemble), field recordings and fake traditional music, following a most elusive trajectory. Competing in purity in his sound approach with the picky Ralf Wehowsky, Bernhard Günter, or even Thomas Köner, Geoffroy also maintains a resolutely physical relationship to sound that brings him closer to his peers (-cussionists) Will Guthrie or Eli Keszler. Despite these somewhat futile attempts at filiation, Tachycardie remains, somewhere in Touraine, one of the most exciting living anomalies in experimental music.

Three years after Pergélisol/Chorémanie, their first diptych album crossing post-punk radicalism and minimalist ambition, the quartet named after Maria Spelterini (an Italian tightrope walker who crossed the Niagara Falls on a wire several times in 1876) released a second record that transcends this delicate aesthetic balance and navigates well beyond/below rock and electronics.

When Pierre-Antoine Parois, Arthur de La Grandière (members of Papier Tigre), Meriadeg Orgebin and Nicolas Joubaud (members of Chausse Trappe) are not in the ranks of La Colonie de Vacances or deep in the dictionary, looking for album titles ("pareidolia" is the phenomenon where the brain creates optical illusions of familiar faces or shapes where there is only abstraction) they imagine the most radical vanishing points to their possessed "Drum & Drone".

Alternately bewitching and heady, this new thirty-three-minute piece of post-krautrock with industrial accents and the allure of ritual music is born from the interaction of a drone and a rhythm evolving side by side, crossing, mixing and responding to each other before disappearing.
Paréidolie opens with near-silent purity, a held synthetic note posed alongside a skeletal beat. The sound spectrum gradually widens, multiplying little by little and combining electronic sources and textures until it generates dissonant sinusoidal vertigo punctuated by a turgid polyrhythm and supported by electric bursts; until the rupture, marked by a bell sound.
On the other side of the mirror, the silence is soon swept away by rustling modulations and convulsed electric feedbacks, slowly restoring a pulsating dynamic, like a negative vision of the first twenty minutes of the piece as one would hear it behind the red velvet curtain of David Lynch. The bell rings again, without stopping this time, and closes the piece with a discontinuous ringing restoring the initial purity.
A resolutely promising young project, Spelterini reconciles the rhythmic and textural rigor of the Austrian post-rockers of Radian with the regressive electric incantations of the Americans of Mosquitoes and signs a breathtaking piece evoking a strange ritual in a power plant.

Audiobook and Soundtrack from her show "Le Périmètre de Denver".

Limited edition of 500 copies.

Stéphane Laporte's solo musical project, Domotic, is a fine example of longevity. Since Bye Bye, his first album released in 2002, the Parisian conscientiously digs a groove aligning on the same axis — which over time looks more like an orbit — the aesthetically perfect pop of the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Old School Ambient, the glorious electronica of the 90’s, the eccentricities of "library music" and the rigor of minimalism. However, it would be unwise to reduce the half-dozen albums and the handful of shorts signed by Domotic to these few influences, as the approach of each of his discs corresponds to an instrumentarium, a precise recording method and an associated concept. Moreover, it seems that for Domotic the construction process is just as important as the result obtained. It is perhaps this perpetual search for new technological and aesthetic experiences, governed by unusually high requirements, which leads him to produce pop as one would compose scholarly music. In the early 2000s, Laporte began to produce music through Pro Tools software by training as a sound engineer. In the evening, he tries his hand at recording synth sounds that will compose Bye Bye, his first record for the Active Suspension label. Three years later, Ask for Tiger, his second album, transposes his fine melodic triturations into song format and vocals make an entrance. There follows a period during which the Parisian will favor collaborations: Centenaire, post-folk rock project in the company of Aurélien Pottier and Damien Mingus, Karaocake, lo-fi pop duo with finely outdated keyboards, alongside Camille Chambon, and Egyptology, “synthetic-cosmic” pair with Olivier Lamm. On the sidelines of these various projects, Laporte returned to solo production, in 2013, with Before and After Silence, a lo-fi and rugged psychedelic pop album, followed by a series of compositions for art films and short films and instrumental albums, including two for the Antinote label under his own name, and a minimalist krautrock record for Gonzaï. His career and his various experiences have allowed the Parisian to refine the complex aesthetic identity of Domotic while multiplying the caps: multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger but also sound engineer and producer as he admirably showed by passing behind the console for Orval Carlos Sibelius’ Super Forma in 2013 and Forever Pavot’s La Pantoufle in 2017. Under a dark and deep blue cover with a design reminiscent of sound illustration records, Descriptions of an unfolding event immediately displays its content "Chords / Melodies / Textures / Rhythms / No words". Combining his passion for soundtracks, his talent for writing songs without words and a composition process inspired by both musical and aesthetic minimalism, Domotic develops on this new album themes reminiscent of François de Roubaix or Ennio Morricone's soundtracks. The endlessly pared down writing and composition are based on the simple repetition and changes of chord of layered melodic forms played on piano and synth and supported by vocals; these finely orchestrated melodic patterns are then gently mangled, as if subjected to a drift which would gradually modify their shape and texture. This second step consists in exploring the possibilities of disappearance of these precious variations into rich textural depths. A bit like the American visual artist Sol LeWitt whose work of wall drawings is based on the repetition of simple shapes constructing a true visual narrative. Laporte develops a musical development made up of thirteen pieces that function as so many perspectives, modulations and alterations of melodic patterns; this game of repetitions / variations / deteriorations accentuates the narrative dimension while creating a play-set of distorting sound mirrors, blurring the temporality and bringing out a certain nostalgia. As an assertive purist, Laporte has favored analog devices (pedals, magnetic tapes and spring reverb) for filtering his sounds, giving them subaquatic metallic nuances and offering them an organic unraveling. Imagine Vladimir Cosma grinded by Christian Fennesz or Broadcast granularized by Jan Jelinek; you're almost there, with the difference that Domotic, even in its most advanced dissolutions, likes to preserve a certain physicality to the sound which conveys powerful images. He thus poses side by side a piece with strong and clear instrumentation and its submerged false doppelganger, with degraded contours and resonance, and suggests to hear its melodic DNA through the hull of a submarine: the themes seem to liquefy, the rhythms are no more than a distant hydraulic punctuation and the blips evoke the sweeping of a sonar. If the majority of the titles of the pieces (Very Deep, Deeper Again, Through Phases, Suspension 2) reinforces this feeling of diving into deep waters, Laporte nevertheless allows himself a wink tribute to the composer Morton Feldman in the shape of a melodic madeleine, with the hit-like Morton, available in 2 versions, Pop Drums and Gamelan, which sounds like the credits of a 70s American soap opera, and its Asian version. Special mention to A willingness to fall asleep, a minimalist avatar in the form of an aquatic hypnosis session where a piano motif swims with timeless grace between an asthmatic oscillation and a spectral chorus drowned in reverb. An ambitious project initiated by Stéphane Laporte in 2017, Descriptions of an unfolding event crystallizes the vast musical inspirations and aesthetic concerns that have animated Domotic for several years. Before and After Silence (2013) and Smallville Tapes (2017) were already exploring this logic of “pop decomposition”, each in their own register and time; this new disc sees Laporte at the top of his melodic art navigating between minimalism, psychedelia and liquid experiments. And we envision Steve Reich and Ennio Morricone chatting with Jacques-Yves Cousteau on the Calypso deck...

Black Truffle presents People Pleaser, the new LP from Nantes-based drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. Initially rising to prominence in Australia as a drummer in the fields of jazz and improvised music, Guthrie later turned increasingly toward electronics and amplified percussion, developing an idiosyncratic style of electro-acoustic performance characterized by shimmering metallic textures, rapid-fire textural transformations and aggressively high volume. Recent years have seen a return to the drum kit in both solo and collaborative work, in performances where Guthrie uses duration and endurance to push at the limits of his formidable technical abilities as a player in the free jazz tradition, working variations on short rhythmic units into an endless flow of non-metered pulse. Although drawing on many aspects of Guthrie’s past work, People Pleaser stands alone in the catalogue of his recorded work. Working fast and intuitively over a period of three weeks, Guthrie has crafted a suite of song-length pieces that combine his drumming with electronics, field recordings, and sampled detritus. Inspired by rough and ready sampling style of producers like RZA, J Dilla and Knxwledge, and by the endless possibilities of musique concrète, People Pleaser uses a highly divergent array of sound sources, building pieces from drum and percussion tracks left over from other projects, audio ripped from skate videos, noise electronics, fragments of a police interrogation, and anything else ready to hand. Guthrie’s unique rhythmic sensibility is the thread drawing all these elements together, his drum performances propulsively rhythmic yet insistently irregular in a way that sometimes brings to mind the uniquely open rhythmic space carved out in the early Weather Report and other classic fusion. Drawing together a manifold of influences in an entirely sui generis way, People Pleaser is a raw, exciting, and surprisingly accessible peak into the laboratory of a unique sensibility.